1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an optical recording medium and a manufacturing method thereof, and more particularly to a user recordable optical recording medium and a manufacturing method thereof wherein unauthorized recording and reproduction of information data is disabled.
2. Description of the Related Art
At present, a write-once DVD-R (Digital Versatile Disc—Recordable) has been commercially produced as a user recordable optical recording medium having a recording capacity of several gigabytes (Gbytes), and a rewritable DVD-RW (DVD—Rewritable) is under development. In addition, a large amount of high quality copies can be made without substantial degradation with the significantly improved performance of such large capacity digital optical recording media and recording/reproducing apparatus.
FIG. 1 is a diagram showing a layout of a physical sector in a radial direction of a recording surface on a DVD-RW which is taken as an example. An information area for recording information data is made up of a lead-in area, a data area, and a lead-out area in this order from the starting point of the information area (i.e., starting point of the physical area) outwardly in the radial direction.
As shown in FIG. 2, the lead-in area contains data for use in reproducing the disc such as a reference code, control data, and so on. A control data region is comprised of 192 ECC (Error Correction Code) blocks. In FIG. 2, ECC blocks within the control data region are indicated using relative sector numbers in a range of 0 to 15. Each of the ECC blocks has the same contents. In other words, 192 ECC blocks having the same contents are recorded in succession. One ECC block is comprised of 16 sectors in which recorded are physical format information, disc manufacturing information, and contents provider information. Thus, data related to the reproduction of such information data is recorded in the control data region in the lead-in area upon recording information data on the disc. Upon reproduction of the disc, a reproducing apparatus reads these data to reproduce recorded information data such as video data based on the read information. In this way, the disc is recorded and reproduced.